@Jay KayWould you say Paul is more decent, rational, and less harmful than Huntsman? I don't mean to ask anything that seems loaded or anything of that nature, just curious because it seems that the consensus among the people I've spoken to is that he's not bad, and it's a damn shame that there's no way he'll get the nomination. So I wonder what you think of him.

@Jay Kay: I honestly can't see how a man who wants to dismantle the EPA, the FDA, and the Department of Education, make the US withdraw from the United Nations, introduce a second, gold based United States currency, and believes that property rights supersede civil rights could possibly be less damaging than Obama. Or even Romney, for that matter. If he were able to enact even half of his agenda he'd be making both the United States and the world a worse place to live.

The most likely scenario of a Paul presidency is that he vetoes every single piece of legislation that crosses his desk, Congress promptly overturns his veto, and since he'll have alienated both houses of Congress he'll be unable to do anything, doing irreparable damage to the reputation of the Executive Branch in the process.

@Fishelle -- Honestly, I don't think I really heard of Huntsman until now. Most of his positions seem okay enough, I suppose. The only one that really bothers me is the foreign policy part--any candidate that is talking about cutting needless spending and talking about the US needing to be the #1 policeman of the world is being a little contradictory.

@DavidLejeune -- Well, those organizations like the EPA, FDA, and DOE are ineffectual at best and inherently corrupt at worst; the United Nations can be blamed for it's own set of atrocities and communication and technologies make such a top-down organization for globalization antiquated; and the massive amounts of inflation and debt makes our fiat currency seem more and more like a massive joke and such a system only exists to keep the wealth at the top level rich and the poor at the bottom.

I'm of the opinion that these last few decades of these organizations' history and their repeated failures at their job prove that these top-down, government mandated systems just do not work.

Well, those organizations like the EPA, FDA, and DOE are ineffectual at best and inherently corrupt at worst

Sorry, I hate stepping into these discussions as they are mostly useless places for people who have no intention of conversing to spout their own political opinions at each other, but this statement comes from ignorance.

In my own lifetime I've seen the air quality in urban centers in the US improve dramatically (thanks EPA!). For an example of what a city in a country without a functional EPA looks like, google images of air quality in Beijing.

You know how meat, vegetables and dairy across the whole United States is consistently reliably healthy and disease/bacteria free? You don't even really think much about that, because it is so commonplace. The FDA did that. NOT some kind of free market. The FDA.

I don't have factual or first-hand experience of the DOE to draw on right now, and I'm not going to hang around this thread long enough to pursue an argument about it, so I'll leave that one aside.

Jay Kay, I do not mean offense, but your libertarianism is lazy and uninformed.

Also, we are not suffering from "massive amounts of inflation". We just factually aren't.

such a system only exists to keep the wealth at the top level rich and the poor at the bottom

So, you favor a redistributive system that would move wealth from the top to the bottom? (Do you even see what you've said at the end there? It surely doesn't mesh with your other stances.)

I think you should think deeper about these issues before declaring opinions.

You know what, in one way you are right--I can definitely be better informed. My political ideas--such as they are, since for me it's really just an extension of how I would want to be treated as a human being--would probably be better understood if I had something more to back it up. So I'll just back off from this--besides, it's an ELECTION thread, not a political thread, so it really doesn't apply anyway.

I think I see a problem with that logic, though--a lot of the Republican candidates are looking pretty nutty right now, but that's because they're trying to appeal to their base so that they can become the official nominee. Once someone becomes the nominee, that person always moves closer to the center, because they're trying to appeal to more people.

Regarding the EPA- I grew up in the 70s. You don't get to say bad things about their existence. I remember making a game of holding my breath when we drove over the Androscoggin river, in Lewiston ME, and watching giant clumps of white foam six inches tall gently float down the brown water. Today you'd never know that happened, and you can even eat what you catch when fishing, so long as you don't eat too many in a year. This is a direct result of EPA cleanup policies.

The EPA stays. Anyone saying we can live in a US without them can damn well travel back in time to the 70s (or earlier, if they're feeling ambitious) until such a time as they learn better.

I don't have any direct experience with the EPA one way or another, but a federal organization whose sole goal is to improve the conditions of the places where human beings live... that sounds like a good idea to me. However good a job they're doing, it has to be better than if they didn't exist at all.

So... Hunstman bailed. I'm kinda sad about that. I didn't agree with even a quarter of what he said, but I could at least see how he got all of his opinions, and respect how he put them forth to the public. The rest of these psychos... well...

Look. I don't WANT to be part of a system where you have to pick one side or the other of an arbitrarily-designated "center," and support the top dog on that side no matter what he or she actually believes, just so that the other side can't win. Computers work in binary. We're human beings. We can, and thus should, do better. Politics is fascinating, and kinda fun to watch, but at the end of the day, we're looking at people who will decide how we'll live the next couple years of our lives. And when you ignore all the other bullshit, ignore all their personalities and pasts and projected goals, and just focus on what you know about them and what they'll do for/to us... none of it looks too great. None of it. I'm not sure there's a single person who has even a 1% chance of becoming President of the United States that I'd be genuinely happy with actually attaining that position (not, mind you, content, relieved, or merely alright, with any of those people becoming President). I have a feeling that's not an uncommon opinion in my country right now.

Really, it's been this way forever. You are all just rather young still, so the familiarity of it hasn't yet sunk in. Everyone has always felt elections were choosing the least bad option. Every four years everyone has a festival of recriminations about how awful it all is. Every four years, for two centuries plus now.

In fact the way it works is pretty decent. Every four years you pick the candidate that moves the various arrows on the policy meters a little bit in the direction you prefer. Nobody gets what they want, but the arrows do move, and over time some things get better, some get worse, and life goes on.

Sometimes people realize this and decide that it is hopeless. But it isn't, especially in areas that matter where efforts can focus. Civil rights was a huge improvement with decades of hard fighting to move those arrows.

Sometimes people like to pretend that it's different, and that by electing one person they can throw the arrows all the way to the other side of the scale immediately, and when that doesn't happen they feel that they've been cheated somehow and declare they will swear off voting. That is comically counterproductive, as it cedes influence to others who likely have opposing agendas.

The arrows move slowly, as they have to, to avoid destructive chaos. But, as a better thinker than I am once said, the arc bends toward justice.

People will encourage you to vote your conscience. I don't, actually. I encourage you to vote for the electable candidate most likely to move the important arrows the way you'd like to see them move. That means that if you have a two party dominated system, as we do, and only two candidates have any real chance of winning, as they do, that you don't throw your vote away on an idealistic third party, but instead use it to put the one of the two closest to your stances into power.

And if you think there is no difference between the two major parties except name, which is another thing people have been saying for decades, just imagine things like: would Al Gore have invaded Iraq? Would John McCain have passed any kind of Universal Health Care bill?

I agree, I may be only 25 and thus still young in the grand scheme of things, but I grew up being taught that you cant always get what you want but what little you can carve out far out weighs nothing at all.

I'm voting for Obama again this year because he saved my life. If he hadn't passed that god-awful socialist-commie-nazi Health Care bill I would not have been able to stay on my parents health insurance and thus wouldn't of been able to afford my stay in the hospital earlier this year because of pre-existing conditions. Was the bill that passed the one that should have been? No, it was far to stripped down, but for fucks sake it was still a million time better than nothing at all.

I don't agree with all of his policies but like Oddbill said, he is the only one that is willing/wanting to move those arrows even a fraction of a space in the direction I want them to go.

There's been a marked trend for the arrows to be moving to the right no matter who is in for the past twenty-thirty years, though. Obama's pretty much a Nixon Republican, when you get right down to it. That's where a lot of the frustration comes in.

But a Nixon Republican is actually to the LEFT of where the current Republican party is. Going towards republicanism of that era is actually moving towards the left. It isn't all the way past the apex of the dial, but you need to go in that direction to get there.

@oddbill: That's my point, though. 40 years on (16 with Democrat Administrations), Nixon should be to the RIGHT of the current GOP. Instead Nixon's policies would be considered radical liberalism or socialism. The needle may move ever so slightly to the left, but that doesn't make much difference when the scale shifts to the right twice as fast (technically the scale would actually be moving to the left as well, in order to make the needle point to things that were originally to the right of centre, but you get my drift).